In what is likely a knife through the
heart for a lot of tech enthusiasts out there, Gizmodo is
reporting that Microsoft has killed plans for its Courier tablet. We
first
caught wind of Courier back in September of 2009 and were quickly
intrigued by its innovative user interface and dual-display "book"
layout.

It should be noted that Microsoft never
officially announced that it would build Courier or said that the
tablet was anything more than a extremely
promising design concept. So it shouldn't be too surprising that
we won't see a finished product on store shelves.

At any given
time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating
them. It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user
interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project
is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in
future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this
time.

Well I would agree with some of what you say, but in reality, the same tools available to Apple are available to all companies that release a product. Namely PR, marketing, decent design, polish and proper market segmentation. The devices that fail to sell like Asus's/Arcos' tablets, everybody else's MP3 players fail for reasons (Poor reviews Cluttered Layout, bad software, little to no marketing resulting in zero brand awareness and trust or non existent support) They might not be able to spend as much as Apple on those things, but if a product is good and people know about it, it will sell. The concept that people believe what they see, hear or read is not a new one...and shouldn't really surprise anyone should it?

People tend to value reccomendation of friends family etc. higher than what the manufacturer says at the end of the day, despite what Apple-haters might suppose, so Apple's position as being the most respected brand amongst the buying public has been earned over many years, and not just given to them on a platter.

For the record I went with AMD around the time with the Pentium 4 and only came back to Intel once the Core was released, no brand loyalty here!